With 10 days to stir and concoct some sort of game plan that would give the Eagles a chance to hang with the better and more talented Broncos, Chip Kelly came to the table with a rather bland recipe. It was an even bigger letdown than the final result itself, a 52-20 thrashing at the hands of Peyton Manning and the Broncos.

The Eagles weren't supposed to go into Denver and win, just like Kelly wasn't expected to come into the NFL and turn this mess of an Eagles roster into an immediate Super Bowl contender. The talent isn't there for either of those miracles.

But what most Eagles fans have been hoping to see are signs that this coach's system and innovative ways will work at this level. That his ability to think on the fly and make adjustments are better than his predecessor's.

Maybe my expectations are skewed. Maybe I'm looking for too much, too fast. It's possible. Kelly has only reached the quarter pole of his first NFL season. The Eagles (1-3) are just one-game back in the NFC East.

But judging from Sunday, everything about Chip Kelly remains in serious question. The honeymoon is over. His team lost by 32 points. The Eagles were an unmitigated disaster, including their alleged genius boss, who is now in the midst of his first real losing streak as a head coach. The game plan he brought to the table was blander than Andy Reid on a podium.

The Eagles didn't seem to run anything different than the first three games and only put the ball in DeSean Jackson's hands twice. That's a crime. I thought Chip would do better. I thought he would find unthinkable ways to put the ball in the hands of his most explosive playmaker. It didn't and hasn't happened.

On Sunday it left the Eagles and their fans left to absorb a boring old blowout, one that could well have belonged to a Rich Kotite, Marion Campbell or Andy Reid the same as it did to Chip Kelly. There were no surprises, no groundbreaking formations and not even a minor fourth-down gamble.

I was hoping to see a reverse-end-around-triple-lindy flea-flicker or the Statue of Liberty play. I expected every Chip trick, and received nothing of the sorts. Boring! And boring is the last thing owner Jeffrey Lurie was expecting when he unleaded the Brinks truck for his new coach.

Kelly even chose to punt on a 4th-and-6 from the Denver 37-yard line with just over two minutes remaining in the first half of a game the Eagles needed a boatload of points to keep competitive. He chose to take a 5-yard penalty and punt.

It was quite a letdown. A coach who comes with the nickname Big Balls Chip isn't expected to punt from the opposing team's 37, especially in the thin mountain air where a field goal should be easily reachable. BBC is supposed to go for it on his own 37.

But, no, Kelly and the Eagles punted. They played it like a conservative team with a top-ranked defense.

That's far from what was expected when Kelly made the jump from Oregon to the NFL. This game against the powerhouse Broncos was the exact situation where his free-wheeling ways were supposed to be evident, where his double-digit underdog Eagles would throw it all on table in order to pull the upset. Anything and everything would be possible from the unpredictable head coach.

Conventional wisdom be damned, the thinking was that Chip Kelly was going to do things his way in the NFL, like go for fourth downs in his own territory and call plays that made our eyes bug and our brains explode.

So far, aside from the opener, there hasn't been much of that. Instead there have been bad challenges, not knowing rules and clock mismanagement.

As for the offense, the Eagles didn't look all that different from the NFL's norm on Sunday. They just tried to run their offense fast all the time rather than some of the time.

Whether that will ultimately work remains up for debate, especially after the Eagles' third straight loss and Kelly's insistence that the offensive sputtering is a product of their own mistakes, not the defenses acclimating to the system.

"Right now it's a lot self-inflicted," Kelly said after the loss. "They're not making us drop the ball, they're not making us get penalties and those are the things that I still think, we call them self-inflicted wounds, and I think that is what is responsible for those [mistakes]."

It's been all downhill since Kelly's offense wowed the league in its first two games. The Eagles scored 63 points against the Redskins and Chargers. They scored 36 against the Chiefs and Broncos. The Eagles have gained plenty of yards the past two games, but haven't scored a lot of points. It a new coach, an old story.